Eleven by Patricia Reilly Giff Read Free Book Online

practice context clues. It had sentences like
Carry your u when it
    rains.
Joseph had written in
underwear
, trying to be funny, and even Mrs. Waring had laughed.
    “Add sensible words,” she said now.
    Sam picked up his pen and bent his head over the booklet. At the same time, he slid one of the papers from the attic out of his pocket. He put it half inside the desk so he could look down at it. A bunch of numbers ran along the page in columns, with
a.m.
or
p.m.
on the sides. A schedule, then.
    He took a quick look at Mrs. Waring to make sure she was still up front; she was watching him. He frowned as if he were trying to think of an answer. The question was idiot easy:
Tigers live in the j
. There was even a sketch of a tiger on one side. Not so easy to spell
jungle
, though.
    At the top of the schedule were a couple of words:
SUMMER—something with an
F—
HOURS.
What?
    Not
fair.
Not free. It had to make sense.
    Mrs. Waring cleared her throat and he looked at his booklet. The next sentence needed a C, a country, China probably.
    It reminded him of something that had happened in second grade. He looked over at the geraniums on the sill. They bloomed all winter, red and orange, with a sharp smell that came from their notched leaves and the damp soil. And only he and Mrs. Waring knew what was under the third pot.
    That year, Mrs. Waring still came to his classroom door and waited until she caught his eye. Sometimes he wouldn't look at her, and one of the kids would yell, “Hey, that teacher is here.”
    “Where are you going?” Eric always asked.
    “Going to China,” he said once, angry.
    “He can't spell
China,”
Marcy had whispered. “He can't spell
cat.”
Marcy, a pain even then.
    “I want to spell
cat,”
he'd told Mrs. Waring, and she'd curved the thumb of his left hand to meet his index finger, then pressed them both open a little. “If I leave my finger in the circle it becomes a G. See?”
    “I don't care about G. I want to know
cat.”
    “Yes, without the finger it's C. Use this hand, the one”— she pulled his left sleeve above his wrist, searching—“the one with the freckle. C for
cat.”
    Someone called her from the office then, and she had to leave the Resource Room. He sat there waiting. His class passed on the way to recess, and he felt that heavy lump begin in his chest. He heard the tick of the clock overhead and put his head down. She still didn't come.
    He stood up and went over to her desk. A small pair ofscissors was in a cup, its ends rounded, but they dug into the wood of the windowsill easily as he began to draw the C.
    It was another teacher who found him, who saw him make the last bit of the curve in the C. And so he had to wait again, this time in the principal's office, while they called Mack.
    “Sorry,” he'd told Mack when he came in the door, looking worried. And “Sorry,” he'd said to Mrs. Akins, the principal. He couldn't imagine what had made him carve up the wood of the sill. But the anger was still there, hot in his chest.
    On the way home, Mack had said, “Pine, softwood. Easy to cut into and ruin.” He'd put his hand on Sam's head.
    “They left me,” Sam said.
    Mack had hesitated. “It's terrible to be alone.”
    “Something in my chest.”
    “Yes, I know.”
    He'd looked up at Mack. “Really?”
    “The next time you're angry, wait until you get home. I'll show you how to get rid of that thing in your chest.” Again that hesitation. “It's what I always did.”
    In the workroom, Mack had given him a block of wood with three large nails hammered a third of the way in. “Just hammer,” Mack had said. “Hammer hard.”
    Sam had done it then, and dozens of times later. It always had something to do with not being able to read. He pounded in the nails until the block that was in his chest shrank away.
    And the next day, Mrs. Waring had put her hand on his shoulder.
“We'll put a flowerpot over the
C.
And someday, we'll take the pot off and tell ourselves